Dance of the Vampires (1967) - film review

After a long journey across Eastern Europe, Professor Abronsius and his faithful apprentice Alfred finally succeed in finding solid evidence for the existence of vampires.   In the snowy mountains of Transylvania, they come across a remote inn which is decorated with garlic and where the locals live in fear of some unseen evil presence.   Sure enough, not long after the arrival of the intrepid vampire hunters, the sinister Count von Krolock pays a visit and abducts Sarah, the beautiful daughter of the Jewish innkeeper, Shagal.  When Shagal himself is transformed into a vampire, Abronsius and Alfred decide it is high time they paid a call on the Count at his ancient Gothic castle.  The Count is a charming man and he seduces the Professor into staying the night by showing him his vast library.  The Count’s son, Herbert, is also a charming man, but his seduction of Alfred is less successful, partly because the latter is not that way inclined, but mainly because he is in love with Sarah.  The next day, the two guests decide to repay their hosts’ kind hospitality by hammering a wooden stake through their hearts.  Through the Professor’s incompetence and Alfred’s cowardice, the attempt to destroy the two vampires fails miserably.  As night falls, Abronsius and his assistant see scores of vampires emerge from their graves around the castle.  With relish, the Count tells them that tonight he will be hosting a special ball, the highlight of which will be a glorious blood feast.  The catering will of course be provided by his human guests...

Gothic horror was enjoying something of a revival in the 1960s, thanks largely to the efforts of the British film company Hammer and its counterpart across the pond, American International Pictures.  Ghouls such as Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, the Wolf Man and the Mummy, had made a comeback and were sharing the limelight with the creepy Edgar Allen Poe / old dark house creations of Roger Corman.  The genre was ripe for parody – indeed some of the supposedly straight horror films of this period (including many of Hammer’s offerings) often crossed the line into self-parody with their bravura performances and slightly camped up re-interpretation of the old Universal horror classics.  No surprise then that the mid-sixties gave cinema audiences two of the best horror spoofs.  The first was Carry On Screaming! (1966), an obvious and very funny send-up of the Hammer horror films.  The second was Dance of the Vampires, a far more subtle parody, conceived and directed by the Polish-French filmmaker Roman Polanski.

Dance of the Vampires was the second in a loose quadrilogy of horror films that Polanski made over his most inspired decade from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies. The cycle began with Repulsion (1965), an expressionistic thriller in which a neurotic Catherine Deneuve frightened the life out of a generation of moviegoers whilst establishing Polanski as one of the most promising young directors of his generation.  After the aforementioned vampire film came Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976), two very creepy psychological thrillers with a blackly comedic underbelly which showed how mad a filmmaker could be if he really set his mind to it.

Dance of the Vampires stands apart from the other three films, not just because the comedy is far more explicit, but because it takes place in a fantasy Gothic landscape, rather than in the more familiar contemporary urban setting.   Not only is Dance of the Vampires the most entertaining of Polanski’s films (the one that most stands up to repeated viewings), it is also the most poetic, being closer in spirit to an old-fashioned fairytale than a conventional horror film.  It offers few genuine chills but plenty of laughs.

Some would dispute whether this film is really a spoof at all.  With its lavish production values (including extraordinarily detailed sets and some stunning cinematography), Dance of the Vampires could easily be rated the most visually seductive of all Gothic horror films.  The lighting, camerawork and accompanying score all lend a sustained mood of lurking menace which cuts through the whimsical humour like a knife through a Hitchcock heroine.  The spectator is frequently confused by what emotion the film is trying to evoke.  When the hapless Alfred (played by Polanski at his cutest) tries desperately to evade his unwilling admirer Herbert von Krolock, should we be laughing out loud or worrying about our next dry cleaning bill?   Likewise, the film’s ending manages to be both tragic and hilarious: Alfred gets his girl, but not in quite the way he had imagined...

With its multiple location shoot, Dance of the Vampires had a troubled production, mainly because its director had previously only made relatively low budget films and now found himself on an extremely steep learning curve.  The film also suffered when it fell into the hands of its American distributors, who insisted on extensive cuts and the insertion of a rather pointless animated prologue (which was presumably for the benefit of those who had never heard the word vampire before).   Given the truly cringe-worthy new title The Fearless Vampire Killers or: Pardon Me, but Your Teeth are in My Neck, the film fared poorly at the American box office, but did comparatively well in Europe in its original unedited form.  Critical reaction to the film was very mixed and it is only recently that it has come to be recognised as one of Polanski’s creative triumphs.

Beneath the surface veneer of comedy, Dance of the Vampires is quite a dark film (as indeed are all of Polanski’s films).  It is clear almost from the outset that the heroes are going to fail, that evil will ultimately triumph and make the world an even darker place.  This pessimistic notion of the ultimate supremacy of evil over good is a theme that runs through most of Roman Polanski’s work and may have been (consciously or otherwise) inspired by his traumatic experiences as a child (he narrowly survived the ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland, but his mother died in a concentration camp).  With his background, Roman Polanski was never going to make a career by directing musical comedies with a conventional Hollywood happy ending.  What is surprising is how much humour there is in his films, admittedly humour of a dark and slightly twisted kind, the humour of a man living in the shadow of the guillotine.

Roman Polanski’s films are almost always about the futility of virtue.  His heroes are often innocent victims or blithe do-gooders who find themselves up against some implacable evil against which, almost inevitably, they are powerless.  Defeating the malign forces of darkness is impossible; the best outcome we can expect is for the hero to survive, perhaps having scored a minor victory.  This is almost the theme of Polanski’s life.  Within two years of marrying the actress Sharon Tate (whom he met and fell in love with whilst making Dance of the Vampires), the director would lose her and their unborn child in a senseless killing orchestrated by Charles Manson’s followers.  Eight years later, he would be indicted for child rape and become a fugitive from American justice, taking refuge in France, where he continued working until his re-arrest during a visit to Switzerland in 2009.  Can it be coincidence that Roman Polanski’s life should bear more than a passing resemblance to the plot of the films he has been making for four decades?  If the work of an artist is a reflection of his own life experiences, what are we to make of the man behind such masterworks as Repulsion, Chinatown, The Pianist and Dance of the Vampires?  Indeed, does the boundary between art and life really exist?

© James Travers 2009

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